Facebook Plans To Double Size Of AI Research Unit By 2020

Facebook is on course to double the size of the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) division in the next two years, according to the company's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun.

FAIR currently has approximately 180-200 staff, but the division is expected to grow to around 400 people by 2020 as Facebook continues to put AI at the heart of its platforms.

"I don't know everybody's name anymore and I don't recognise everybody either," LeCun admitted in an interview at Facebook's New York office. Asked whether FAIR is likely to double in size in the next couple of years, LeCun said: "Yes, probably. That's a pretty safe bet."

Members of FAIR carry out fundamental research in the field of AI. Some of their breakthroughs are applied to Facebook's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) by an applied machine learning (AML) team and other engineers, but the majority of their research is purely academic. So far they've developed algorithms that can analyse MRI scans and play games like "Starcraft," among other things.

But competition for AI talent is intense. Facebook and Google are locked in a battle to hire the smartest minds in the field, while others like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are also trying to poach the best PhD students and other academics, leading to brain drain concerns.

FAIR GOES HEAD-TO-HEAD WITH DEEPMIND

Facebook is hiring many of these people through FAIR, while Google, or Alphabet, as Google's parent company is known, is hiring through DeepMind, and Google Brain to some extent.

DeepMind's team has swelled from less than 100 to over 700 since it was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400 million.

Asked why FAIR hasn't grown at the same rate as some other AI labs, Rob Fergus, head of FAIR in New York, said: "It's a market supply. We only really go for the very best people and there's only so many of them on the market each year so there's a limitation there. There are people who they [DeepMind] make offers to who we don't. Of course, we do fight a lot. We have huge battles with them for the best talent. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose."

He added: "Virtually everyone we make an offer to has an offer from Google. These days, [it is] also Amazon and Intel and whoever else."

LeCun and Fergus both denied to comment on the salaries offered to top people in the field but LeCun confirmed some senior people in the industry are paid seven figures. "Almost all of it is in equity," he said. "The salary is decent, but most of it is in shares."

FAIR has staff in Menlo Park, New York, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Montreal, Paris, Tel Aviv, and London. The largest collection of FAIR staff is in Paris, where there is around 70 staff. New York and Menlo Park are next, followed by Montreal and the others.